‘2018 YouTube Rewind’ Grows With Dislikes

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This year has seen so many trends and changes in pop culture, from viral videos of a boy yodeling in Walmart to thousands of YouTubers playing Fortnite. It’s hard to encapsulate 2018 into one single video, but YouTube tried.

The video-sharing website turned 13-years-old in February and, for the past eight years, produced a reflection of each year in what they call “YouTube Rewind.”

“YouTube Rewind” is a cinematic recreating of the year’s most viewed video or trend of videos in less than 10 minutes with a remix of that year’s top songs.

Though often popular, 2018’s video hit almost 10 million dislikes in six days, making it the second most disliked video behind Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” according to Business Insider.

If the video does pass Bieber’s “Baby” music video then it will be the fasted and most disliked video in YouTube history.

Senior Emilio Carrion saw the videos failure almost instantly. He has seen plenty of their prior videos so he could easily see where they have changed for the worst.

“It’s biggest downfall is how disconnected YouTube is from its audience,” Carrion said. “YouTube sees the ‘Rewind’ as a way of advertising its brand and values to other companies. Due to this, they try to play it as safe as humanly possible and in the process lose touch with the community.

“Another thing that brought it down was the fact that there were a ton of random celebrities featured that weren’t necessarily YouTubers. Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, Will Smith, and Ninja—while they do have content that is accessible on YouTube, they aren’t good representations of the YouTube community because it’s not their main medium of delivering the content they produce.”

Carrion acknowledges that his previous enjoyment of the “Rewinds” might have been because he was younger when they first were introduced but he doesn’t recognize one good quality of the “Rewind.”

Senior Tristan Blair feels strongly about what YouTube tried to accomplish, but knows a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon without giving the video a chance.

“The rewind ignores what makes YouTube unique as a platform (i.e, individual personalities and creators who can cater to more niche subcultures of people), and instead opts to be just a soulless imitation of the wide-appeal television networks it’s trying to shamelessly copy.”